News:

“Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors; we borrow it from our Children.”Ancient American Indian Proverb Civilitas successit barbarum Ubi Jus - Ibi Remedium ----> Equity sees that as done what ought to be done Equity will not suffer a wrong to be without a remedy - Equity delights in equality - One who seeks equity must do equity - Equity aids the vigilant, not those who slumber on their rights - Equity imputes an intent to fulfill an obligation - Equity acts in personam - Equity abhors a forfeiture - Equity does not require an idle gesture - He who comes into equity must come with clean hands - Equity delights to do justice and not by halves -Equity will not complete an imperfect gift - Equity will not allow a statute to be used as a cloak for fraud

President Donald Trump—who remarked Tuesday that his administration ended the nonexistent "war on beautiful clean coal"—really wants to make fossil fuels 🦖 great again.

The White House plans to ask Congress to cut the Department of Energy's renewable energy and energy efficiency programs by a massive 72 percent in fiscal 2019, according to draft budget documents obtained by the Washington Post.

The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy's (EERE) current spending level is set at $2.04 billion for the current fiscal year ending on Oct. 1. But the Trump administration will significantly lower that amount to $575.5 million for 2019, the Post reported.

The EERE supports the development of sustainable transportation, renewable power, and energy-efficient homes, buildings and manufacturing. Its SunShot Program has significantly reduced the total costs of solar energy.

The draft budget document calls for a number of cuts, including:

֍ A staff cut of 680 in the enacted 2017 budget to 450 in 2019.

֍ Reducing research in fuel efficient vehicles by 82 percent.

֍ Cutting research into bioenergy technologies by 82 percent.

֍ Shrinking research into solar energy technology by 78 percent.

This is the second year Trump has targeted clean energy spending. Last year, he proposed cutting the office's budget by two-thirds to $636.1 million, which Congress later rejected.

"It shows that we've made no inroads in terms of convincing the administration of our value, and if anything, our value based on these numbers has dropped," one EERE employee told the Post.

The reported spending cut comes not long after Trump's decision to impose steep tariffs on imported solar panels and related equipment—a move that experts say will stifle the current solar boom, harm the fastest-growing job sector in the U.S., and drag down clean energy innovation.

The draft document could change before the federal budget is due later this month, but as the Post pointed out, the budget "will mark a starting point for negotiations and offer a statement of intent and policy priorities."

In response, the White House🦀 told the newspaper: "We don't comment on any leaked or pre-decisional documents prior to the release of the official budget."

Agelbert NOTE: Please observe in that innocent sounding title below that NO Energy CEO from Solar, or wind or geothermal, etc. is actually included in the term, "U.S. Energy CEOs" (as in, "our loyal energy servants" ).

Ain't that just amazing how these exclusively FOSSIL FUEL related Corporate CEOs can be made to look like they cover the whole energy enchillada in the USA. When ya look at at that way, their "request" does not look like what it is (i.e. a GOVERNMENT HAND OUT funded by we-the people ).

These fine fellows love to talk about private enterprise and hard work and all that. The truth is that they are now, and they always have been, Welfare Queen polluting crooks and liars.

Of course their tool Trump will scramble to do their bidding by calling it a "jobs program" or the other standardised bit of bullshit (i.e. "it's for national security") the fossil fuelers love to trot out.

When Hurricane Harvey hit that area, I told you the Houston channel dredging costs would be massive and the Fossil Fuel Fascists would try to pass the buck for the fix to we-the-people. Now it is happening.

Tell me again about how "profitable" these fossil fuel corporations are so I can laugh in your embarrassingly ignorant face! THEY bring about the environmental hit on the channel through their polluting crap and then THEY don't have the money to fix what THEY mostly caused. And you call THAT a "profitable" business? What a nation of total suckers we are to keep allowing these welfare queen crooks to socialize the costs and privatize the profits.

The Theo T 🦕 departs the port of Corpus Christi with the first export cargo of US crude oil since the United States government repealed a 40 year ban on the export of crude oil in December 2015. Picture taken December 31, 2015. Photo credit: Port of Corpus Christi

CEOs of six well-known American energy companies signed a letter addressed to President Donald Trump on Wednesday in support of the Corpus Christi Ship Channel Improvement Project (CIP).

The CC Ship Channel Improvement Project will widen the Corpus Christi Ship Channel to 530 feet, plus add additional barge shelves, to allow for two way vessel and barge traffic. It will also deepen the channel to 54 feet, which will allow for the safe and efficient passage of deep draft vessels, including Very Large Crude Carriers.

The Port of Corpus Christi and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers signed a Project Partnership Agreement for the project last October, but as of now the project still lacks the required funding needed to get off the ground.

The letter requests funding for the United States Army Corps of Engineers to deepen and widen the Corpus Christi Ship Channel in an effort to meet surging global demand for U.S. produced oil and natural gas.

Since the U.S. lifted the 40-year-old ban on crude oil exports in late 2015, the Port of Corpus Christi has emerged as the largest export port of U.S. produced crude oil, and it is a major export hub for U.S. energy products.According to Energy Analysts International, the Port of Corpus Christi exported more than $6 billion of crude oil to U.S. trading partners in 2017, contributing to offset the United States trade deficit.

CEOs from Occidental Petroleum 🦖 Corporation, NuStar 🦖 Energy L.P., Buckeye 🦖 Partners, L.P., Howard 🦖 Energy Partners, Plains All American 🦖 Pipeline, and Cheniere 🦖 Energy, Inc. specifically asked that the President include $60 million for this project in his Fiscal Year 2019 Presidential Budget to begin Federal participation in its construction.

”Funding the CIP is an opportunity to invest in a national transportation asset that would allow our U.S. companies and the port to significantly increase our export capacity and help solidify the U.S. as a world energy leader,” the CEOs stated in their letter to President Trump.

“With widespread bipartisan support, we are confident you will find this project the most worthy of funding of all U.S. coastal navigation construction projects in the Nation,” said Sean Strawbridge, Port Corpus Christi CEO in an attached letter to President Trump. “In support of this project are U.S. energy companies who themselves are investing billions in infrastructure from the rich producing energy fields of West Texas to Corpus Christi. As the gateway to the global markets, Port Corpus Christi must ensure the infrastructure it oversees, namely the Corpus Christi Ship Channel, is capable of transporting safely and competitively the anticipated increased export volumes of crude oil, natural gas, and other petroleum products.At the center of the emergence of the United States as a dominant player in the global energy market is the Corpus Christi Ship Channel Improvement Project.”

Think of President Trump 🦀 and his administration as a den of thieves. There is, of course, the obvious thievery: what they will in the end, as with the recently passed tax “reform” bill, steal from ordinary citizens and offer as never-ending presents to the already staggeringly wealthy, among them the president himself (possible savings up to $15 million annually) and son-in-law Jared Kushner (possible savings: up to $12 million annually). According to the Congressional Budget Office, government cash reserves are already starting to fall faster than expected as a result of lost revenue from that bill. And the modest gains offered to ordinary taxpayers to give cover to a vast increase in the wealth of the top 1% will all sunset in the 2020s, while that bill’s corporate tax cuts are meant for eternity.

Think of such moves not as acts of petty theft, but as robbery of the most basic sort, since they involve stealing from the future to fund an increasingly plutocratic present. The Donald, in other words, isn’t just stealing from us but from our children and grandchildren. And if that’s true of his tax bill, it’s so much truer of his energy policies, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare makes clear in a newsworthy manner today. That the president’s addiction to fossil fuels, his belief that freeing Big Energy from every form of restriction and regulation, is crucial to future American global domination has, Klare informs us, been embedded in the administration’s recently released National Security Strategy. In other words, the exploitation of fossil fuels in North America is now officially the heart and soul of the global policy-making of President Trump and his generals.

This isn’t just a matter of stealing future money from our children and grandchildren, or even of polluting the American environment in which they’ll grow up in a fashion familiar to anyone — like Donald Trump (or me) — who was raised in the 1950s. It’s a matter of stealing everything from them, including potentially the very environment that’s nurtured generation after generation of children on this planet for all the thousands of years of human history. If the president and his crew of climate deniers have their way and a fossil-fuelized version of energy “dominance” comes to rule our American world, while the path to alternative energy growth is crippled, then they will have stolen from the future in the most basic way imaginable for the comfort of just a few human beings now. As part of what can only be thought of as a semi-conscious plan to further warm the planet, President Trump’s energy policy will, without any doubt, represent not just thievery, not just the crime of this century, but terracide, the destruction of the planet itself, which will be the crime of any century. Keep that in mind as you read Klare’s piece today. Tom

A woman drove 100 miles to West Virginia's state capitol to testify against invasive drilling legislation, but was pulled off the House floor for highlighting how fossil fuel money corrupts politics, Ben Norton reports.

With the release of proposed new and lower fuel-economy rules expected from the NHTSA by March 30, many eyes have turned to the powerful California Air Resources Board.

The state's pioneering role in reducing emissions and cutting air pollution predates even the existence of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

That agency, now run by Scott Pruitt—an unabashed proponent of burning fossil fuels and a climate-science denier—will shortly issue its own related proposal for boosting the carbon-dioxide emissions allowed from road vehicles.

California, however, is not likely to accede to any radical increase in national emission standards.

Instead, it has a long-established legal right to establish its own, tougher emission rules, recognizing its pioneering role and the specially dire air-pollution conditions in the Los Angeles Basin.

Unless, that is, Pruitt reverses himself and decides to attack that right by rescinding the "waiver" to the national rules that permits that, one of a long series stretching back 30 years.